Amenities

Blog

What works centre for local economic growth:

Can expanding airports help local growth take off?

August means airports, and now that air travel has rebounded from the lows during the Covid-19 pandemic to reach levels where globally there are more flights than ever, airports face bigger and bigger tests on their capa...Read more...

Will Brett-Harding

28 August 2025

Government consultation

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Written evidence submitted by Paul Cheshire to the planning and infrastructure bill committee...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

24 April 2025

Blog

LSE USAPP:

Corporate landlords are eroding the American dream of homeownership, especially in black neighborhoods

There has been a growing trend for institutional investors to purchase single-family homes and convert them to permanent rental properties. At the same time, homeownership rates for black households have declined on par ...Read more...

Stephen B. Billings and Adam Soliman

18 December 2023

CEP occasional paper

A micro-geographic house price index for England and Wales

We generate a mix-adjusted house price index for England and Wales from 2010 to 2020 at the level of lower-layer super output areas. To this end, we blend parametric and non-parametric estimation techniques and leverage ...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Felipe Carozzi and Lukas Makovsky

1 December 2023

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Planning may be a political hot potato but radical reform cannot wait

Planning - largely because of the cruel growth in the unaffordability of housing - has risen up the political agenda. Reforms are urgently needed to allow more homes to be built, but change is notoriously difficult. Ahea...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

15 November 2023

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How can UK policy-makers make homes more affordable?

Housing in the UK has become seriously unaffordable; the problem is likely to get worse and younger people are being hit the hardest. Reforms that could be effective in solving the crisis are considered politically infea...Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber

2 October 2023

Blog

LSE Business Review:

What can house prices tell us about the environmental costs of overhead power lines?

The transition to green energy requires many new electrical power lines to be constructed. In the UK, this construction is a contentious planning and political issue. Steve Gibbons and Cheng Keat Tang show the local cost...Read more...

Stephen Gibbons and Cheng Keat Tang

25 September 2023

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

A true housing crisis needs more than post-truth politicians

The UK's housing crisis is particularly acute by international standards. Instead of identifying real solutions, argues Paul Cheshire, policy-makers have offered only rhetorical devices, ineffective local mechanisms, and...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

5 September 2023

Chapter

Housing

in Policy Landscape 2023

What are the public policy challenges confronting the UK? What plans do the parties have for addressing them? To what extent are these plans fit for purpose? As Parliament returns from its summer recess, Full Fact and U...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

5 September 2023

Chapter

Housing policy and affordable housing

in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance

Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities throughout the world. The main underlying cause for the "affordability crisis," which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of ...Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Olivier Schoni

22 November 2022

Blog

VoxTalks Economics:

Levelling up Europe's left-behind places (podcast)

Recorded live at CEPR Paris Symposium 2022: Inequality isn't just between individuals, but between regions too. Henry Overman explains to Tim Phillips why these disparities exist, why they are so persistent, and whether ...Read more...

Henry G. Overman

8 July 2022

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Why is it so difficult to tackle the lack of affordable housing?

Boris Johnson has pledged that more people will be helped onto the property ladder and that the supply of housing will be improved. Christian Hilber and Olivier Schoni consider the history of housing policy and the chall...Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Olivier Schoni

9 June 2022

Blog

Wheeler Institute for Business and Development, London Business School:

Harnessing the potential of urbanisation in Africa: land and housing policy

Tanner Regan examines the potential for urban planning to encourage public and private investment in land and infrastructure....Read more...

Tanner Regan

29 March 2022

Government consultation

Meeting housing demand

House of Lords: Built Environment Committee, 1st Report of Session 2021 to 22....Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber

10 January 2022

CEP election analysis

Housing

Housing affordability is a key concern of an ever-larger fraction of UK voters who are crammed into artificially limited space. It also underlies the sense of being shut out of prosperity and unable to escape declining l...Read more...

Paul Cheshire and Christian A. L. Hilber

27 November 2019

External report

Homes on the right tracks

Technically, there is an easy solution to the UK crisis of housing supply: find more land for housing. This is not a physical problem but a political one. The land is there but policies and habits of thought prevent its ...Read more...

Boyana Buyuklieva and Paul Cheshire

22 September 2019

CEP discussion paper

Valuing the environmental benefits of canals using house prices

The canal and waterway network in Britain provides a potentially valuable recreational and environmental amenity. In this paper, we estimate the value of this amenity based on how much households are willing to pay throu...Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Cong Peng and Cheng Keat Tang

14 March 2019

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

New road infrastructure: the effects on firms

This paper estimates the impact of new road infrastructure on employment and labour productivity using firm level longitudinal data for Britain. Exposure to transport improvements is measured through changes in accessibi...Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Teemu Lyytikainen, Henry G. Overman and Rosa Sanchis-Guarner

1 March 2019

CEP discussion paper

The making of the modern metropolis: evidence from London

Modern metropolitan areas involve large concentrations of economic activity and the transport of millions of people each day between their residence and workplace. We use the revolution in transport technology from the i...Read more...

Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm

12 September 2018

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics:

Roads, railroads, and decentralization of Chinese cities

We investigate how urban railroad and highway configurations have influenced urban form in Chinese cities since 1990. Each radial highway displaces 4% of central city population to surrounding regions, and ring roads dis...Read more...

Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Loren Brandt, J. Vernon Henderson, Matthew A. Turner and Qinghua Zhang

1 July 2017

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

The impact of supply constraints on house prices in England

We test the theoretical prediction that house prices respond more strongly to changes in local earnings in places with tight supply constraints using a unique panel dataset of 353 Local Planning Authorities in England be...Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Wouter Vermeulen

1 March 2016

Journal article

Econometrica:

The economics of density: evidence from the Berlin Wall

This paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks. The model remains tractable and amenable to empi...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Stephen J. Redding, Daniel M. Sturm and Nikolaus Wolf

1 November 2015